One of the most beloved FPS games of the 90’s was Heretic and its sequels Hexen and Hexen II. These games were fantasy themed FPS games where instead of guns, you used magical weapons. While it was heavily influenced by Doom, it was able to establish its own identity and is a series I truly wish would return one day. While that has not happened yet, it seems a spiritual sequel has emerged in the form of Ziggurat.
Ziggurat is a rougelike with procedurally generated scenarios and encounters through the Ziggurat. You play as different characters, each with their own stats, who are unlocked as you progress through the game. By accomplishing various tasks or goals, you gain access to the new characters and their abilities, in addition to the starting characters. The game, much like the aforementioned Heretic and Hexen games, is a first person game with magical weapons and mystical enemies and it is excellent. The game just feels great as you play it and you can really feel the attention to detail put into the game with the various weapons, characters and enemies.
That said, this is not perfect. On the Wii U version, there is a large amount of loading and even pausing the game caused loading and waiting for me. As I understand it, this can be remedied with putting the game on the internal memory and not on an external hard drive. This helps with some of the issues but not all of them.
That said, aside from the loading issues, the game is good. I had a lot of fun playing it and the FPS mechanics and rougelike mechanics worked well. Visually it was stunning and the weapons effects all worked great. The music was great and really worked in well to give the game a classic feel. It really feels like a fun combination of old and new, with the rougelike elements blended with old school FPS game mechanics. It really si unlike anything else. It might be strange to call it a successor to the Heretic and Hexen Games but I truly get the same feeling from this game that I did from those ones. I must recommend this, although I hope there is a patch soon to fix the loading issues.